Did candidates improperly obtain OPRA request record?
Sussex County WatchdogLast week, the campaign of Nathan Orr & David Atwood posted the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request of a citizen and resident of Sussex County. The actual open records request is a public record, but it must be obtained through the OPRA process. It cannot be accessed due to a "tip-off" from a records custodian or another public official. That is against the law.
Sussex County is notorious for its abuse of the open records process. In the past, news of an OPRA request has made the rounds in the county even before the requester was notified that the request had been received. This is against the law.
The reason it is against the law is to prevent those who have cause to want their records covered up from using the details from the records request to pressure or intimidate the requester into altering or withdrawing the request. In the past, campaign staff and or consultants to campaigns have been threatened with tortious interference as an inducement to have either their client or them withdraw their legal right to open public records through the OPRA process.
Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm. Wikipedia provides this example: "Someone could use blackmail to induce a contractor into breaking a contract or they could obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods."
At the root of this controversy is the fact that David Atwood, the running mate of Nathan Orr, voted using the wrong name at last November's presidential election.
On October 16, 2012, David Wygonski -- a native of Illinois -- registered to vote in Sussex County, New Jersey. He did not register as a Republican. He voted in the November presidential election that year, but missed every opportunity to vote again until the presidential election of November 2016.
By then, he was no longer David Wygonski, having changed his name to David Atwood by court order on May 2, 2014.
But that didn't stop David Atwood from voting under his former name in a federal election on November 8, 2016.
That's right, this week it was confirmed by a voter registration officer, an officer of the court, and a citizen witness, that David Atwood wrote the signature of "David Wygonski" in order to gain access to vote in the federal election held on November 8, 2016. Atwood did this while presumably aware that the signature he made and the voter name he attested to had not been his legal name in over two years. The Court did not give grant him permission to use TWO names. The Court granted him permission to legally change his name.
David Atwood did not register to vote under his LEGAL name until December 21, 2016. He has never voted as David Atwood.
David Atwood did not register to vote as a Republican until January 11, 2017. He has never voted as a Republican.
In February, David Atwood became an Assembly candidate. At the time he told a group of Republican voters that he was a "new voice for the Republican Party." Yes, very new.
In fact, even after changing his name to David Atwood, he continued to be registered at his former address in Sussex County as David Wygonski. In effect, he was counted twice on the voter rolls under two different names, at two different addresses.
No kidding. As of February 10, 2017, he was an "active" voter at two different addresses under two different names (see below):
Recently, candidate David Atwood has been wailing like a baby with a wet nappy. The cause of all this pissing and moaning was an action taken by the elected Warren County Republican Chairman, Doug Steinhardt. Chairman Steinhardt noticed that Atwood was actively registered to vote TWICE -- and had the good sense to challenge Atwood's candidate petition in order to get to the bottom of it. Ever since, David Atwood has been crying like a badly chafed toddler in need of a powder and some kind words from mother.
We know some on the Left (fewer now, than before) claim there are no problems with the voter rolls, but then you come across a story like this, from just last month:
LANSDALE, Penn. -- The feds say a Pennsylvania man has been using a dead boy’s identity for more than 21 years, CBS Philly reports.
Authorities got involved after a relative of the deceased used Ancestry.com to put her family tree together.
A woman was getting information on Ancestry last year and her nephew Nathan Laskoski popped up. She saw that he got married and he moved around the country -- from Texas to Mississippi to Tennessee and eventually to Pennsylvania.
But the problem is Laskoski died in 1972 when he was two months old.
Authorities say 44-year-old Jon Vincent escaped back in 1996 from a halfway house in Texas, and went to a cemetery to find someone born around the same time that he was.
Prosecutors say he picked Laskoski and found his birth certificate, which he used to get a social security number.
Authorities say that started 20-plus years of jobs, bank accounts, loans, marriage and divorce as Nathan Laskoski.
(CBS News, April 12, 2017)
David Atwood and his running mates, Nathan Orr and Bill Hayden, claim that the Warren County Republican Chairman was making a fuss over nothing. But when you look at all the recent examples of voter fraud -- under-reported by the media but real court cases nonetheless -- you begin to appreciate Chairman Steinhardt's vigilance:
- San Pedro, California: 83 absentee ballots were sent to different registered voters who all supposedly lived in the same small, two-bedroom apartment. If it wasn’t for an observant neighbor, this case would never have been discovered.
- Pennsylvania: Democrat organization FieldWorks LLC was raided by Pennsylvania State Police for fraudulently filling out registration forms for thousands of voters.
- Indiana: State police “believe there could be hundreds of fraudulent voter registration records with different combinations of made up names and addresses with people’s real information.“
- Chicago, Illinois: An investigation by CBS Channel 2 in Chicago found people who had been registered to vote after their death, and a total of 119 dead people who had voted 229 times.
- Examination of just eight out of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities: After being unwilling to sign a form that they were US citizens, 1,046 illegal aliens were discovered to already be registered voters.
- In an undercover video, even Democrats were recently caught complaining about the amount of voter fraud created by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to give out ID cards without checking recipients’ identities.
- In North Carolina’s closely contested gubernatorial election, massive fraud may have altered the outcome of that race. The North Carolina Democrat Party-funded political action committee apparently paid individuals to fill out and witness hundreds of fraudulent absentee ballots. At least 35,750 people with the same names and birthdates voted in North Carolina and another state in the last presidential election. Other clear cases involved deceased individuals voting after their death. (Research courtesy of John Lott)
Atwood, Orr, and Hayden owe Chairman Doug Steinhardt an apology.
